


Liminal Void

by CloudDreamer



Series: Theater of Tragicomedy [10]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Complicated Relationships, Existence Issues, F/M, Gender Issues, POV Second Person, Post-Divorce, The Homestuck Epilogues: Candy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-09-28 00:54:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20417192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudDreamer/pseuds/CloudDreamer
Summary: you:1.occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.2.completely empty.OR,Roxy has a midlife crisis.





	Liminal Void

You stand in the nothing.

No, you live in it. You thrive in it. You breathe in the absence of sound, light, existence, and you exhale fear. It is only in the in between that you are free. 

The sky above you is black— perfect midnight. There are no stars. Your eyes are closed, but you see. It might be dark, but you see. You see through a lens of soft pink, and it is beautiful. Only in nothing can you be free.Your hands are up to the sky, touching that starless waste. There are no waves of blue and purple, just thick blackness that reflects nothing of you.

There is something between your toes. On your ankles. It pulls you down from the sky. 

There is asphalt beneath your feet. It is definite. Hot. You are defined by its presence, and it is a chain around your ankles, tied to a metal ball that keeps you from moving like the bodyless creature of night that you can’t keep from imagining yourself as. 

There is oil on this asphalt. It’s a splatter, like someone threw it haphazardly. You step into it, darkening your [VOID] skin. 

You are a god in this world. You are powerful. You could summon anything from the nothing of this— the nothing of you that you cannot ever fully be.

These chains are painfully real, made of blood. They are the burning red ties that keep you at home. They keep you at the table with Jane, politely sipping a glass of soda and carefully cutting your meat when part of you wants to dig it into her chest. She won’t shut up, and she never listens to you. She never even asks.

These chains are translucent. They are rusted with age, dust from the wind, gold echoing memories of the doomed and the gone. When you shift, that damned light reflecting off them even though there aren’t any stars in your perfect black sky, they’re that candy red again, they’re the grass in the forest you stepped scarps to get here, to this abandoned highway that’s almost buried by the emptiness. 

They’re the jade stone in the ring you still wear even though he doesn’t, symbolizing a bond that’s long since fallen so far apart. 

He didn’t even tell you when he did. Let you find it in the bottom of a sunflower yellow well, in the center of an almost Prospitian town, hidden in the middle of the forest you’d walked through to be here in this no man’s land. It’s in your palm, enclosed within a fist, and it burns. It must’ve been a long time since he lost it (you pretend he lost it, though you know it’s a lie in between your conscious thoughts) because it’s turned verdigris teal. 

You want to throw it, but you don’t want to see the light reflect off the stone. 

There is blue in your eyes now. Your tears are too bright. Saccharine. They run down your cheeks, and they are so bright. They taste sweet, before the wind comes to brush them away. Softly. Gently. He is in the air that you don’t want to have lungs to breathe, but he is not here. His hands are not in yours, his lips are not on yours, and his smile isn’t there.

But it is not his hands you want to hold you, not his face that you want to kiss, and not his smile you want to see. It is not air that you need to feel this void. He only makes you feel solid in opposition. It is in this space that is not a space that you let yourself scream. 

You surrendered your choice a long time ago. You know there is another world out there— a better one— and you know there is another world out there— a worse one. In both, you are happy by now. Which is which?

You are not the yes or the no. You are the or that gives the choice. You are the mechanism, and she was the inspiration, and he was the hand on the button. There was another, the designer, but she is gone. Your daughter is gone, and you replaced her with your fake friend, your missing husband, and your true son. 

You are the how of this superposition and invisible, and you keep from thinking of this because there is no point to wondering about what ifs that don’t matter. You are here. You are now. And what is now is a lie, inessential, irrelevant, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t mean you don’t matter. 

This moonless, cloudless, starless night will not last forever. You will not live in the in between frame of existence on this indefinite road with long since rusted cars with shattered glass windows, long since looted or scavenged by hungry souls. Some are overturned. There are stains of troll blood, troll vomit. 

You sit at tables with the empress, and you keep caring about her. 

You can’t not care.

If she could only see. 

You have to believe in her because there’s nothing else for you to believe in. Your heart is gone, and so your hope is with her. You cannot see the light.

If it is sin to do nothing in the face of injustice, then you are the devil as you stand here, feet deep in motor oil and hands, clutching a ring, to the empty sky. There could be cracks in it, you think, and maybe the light that’d fall through would be blinding. 

And maybe you’d be finally gone from here. Because even if this is only the emptiness between pages, that absence is still real. It is the negative space. It is the black that makes the white matter. It is the girl in you that makes the boy in him so strong and now, in this imperfect and bound night, you think that maybe neither of you were as defined as you believed. 

This is the breeze in space.


End file.
